About Vacuum Games

Vacuum Games is a tiny group of game developer(s, maybe someday).
The goal is to make games that won't waste your life, but make it better. Games that won't devour your soul. Games that will add the colour to the daily gray.

Our current project is the recreation of Tunnelers, which we're recoding in Unity 3D, hoping that someday, the game will grow, and will return to the former developers.

Commercial

OK, so with the important stuff first: have a look at the source code HERE.

People new to code, feel free to browse it with awe.
Pro’s, feel free to look at that crap jibberish some noob wrote up, and give him a lesson.

If your somewhat familiarized with Git and Github, feel free to fork it, just make a pull request when you think that you made some good change.

Reasons

The school year started. That’s right. And you know what’s even worse? I’m on a new school (I don’t know how you call it in English. High school? Probably. Gymnasium to be accurate). That means: less time to code. Open-sourcing Tunnelers prevents it from dying out.NOTE: This does NOT mean I’m leaving Tunnelers alone!

I love open-source. I would probably open-source it even if I wasn’t going to school.

I like the Github interface much more than Bitbucket’s, but Github doesn’t host private repos for free.

I was tired working on it alone. Now people can at least see that I’m actually doing something on it, file issues, create pull-requests, etc.

Pretty good reasons, huh? If you don’t like them, well, bad luck. There’s no way back.

Newsletter

Please please please subscribe to the newsletter you see on the left, if you want to continue getting news on Tunnelers. I never ever use those emails for something different than sending mails when there’s a new announcement, and, as you see, that doesn’t happen often. The process of sending the newsletter is automated, so you will always get the news first.

Chances are you’re reading this only because I’ve personally told you. Please do subscribe.

Thanks.

RoadmapBeta:

fix bugs

add mute button

optimize network usage and client-side prediction

make a little graphics (but only a little)

bots. AIs. Call them what you want, but you will be able to play and have fun playing alone when they will be.

public vote on what future roadmap. This is where all the fun starts. Just to be quick, you will be able to choose from: digging, new tanks, new game modes, new maps, better graphics, new GUI (see note), text and voice chat, controller support, new platforms and so on.

Note: I will completely recreate the GUI when the new GUI system arrives in Unity, and that will probably be later this year.

The gaming session

Thanks to everyone who was there. If you captured a video or something, mail me. Hope everyone had fun. I sure did. See you next time!

And a very important thing for the end:

Thanks

To everyone who made this happen:

Shadowcrush, for the music and coding support, and for being cool.

@damagefilter, or Chris, or whatever you want to call him, for the excellent Unity networking tutorials. Without it, I don’t know how I would code all of it. You can still see snaps of his code in the source.

and, of course, everyone else, who I am not going to name because I’m not going to risk I will forget somebody. I you ever asked when will Tunnelers be released, played it with me, criticized me or chat with me about it, you should be here. Great thanks. You make this happen. And to those thinking I should write you all down, I don’t think it would fit here.

Thanks again. You helped Tunnelers: Unified be a reality, if only a fable one.

Yes, I know, probably not that a big thing to have it’s seperate post, but it’ll sent to FB, Twitter & G+ automatically, and as I’m too lazy to do that, posting this’ll do it for me.

I accidentally wrote the wrong dates in the previous post. It’s fixed, so please correct your votes accordingly. Just for the info, it’s the week 23.07.2014-29.07.2014, so a week from now.

Also, a bit more info on the matches (since I’m writing this anyway), there will be one+ matches (according how many players will be), one will be Teamspeaked & streamed/recorded, and the others will be just for random people who don’t know much about the game or don’t have much experience with it and don’t want to be on a sort of “comeback” match.

The Tunnelers: Unified Beta will be opened by a series of matches, so it would be great if you can all come. That’s why this poll exists. You can see days from Wednesday to Tuesday (16.07.2014-22.07.2014 23.07.2014-29.07.2014 (mega apologies for this, I won’t be here that week, sorry)). All times are CET (Central Europe Time, GMT+1). Please vote on all the times you will be available. The matches will take place on the day that receives most votes. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

These builds however won’t work online until the master server is launched, which will be a little before the start of the matches. Be sure to use the standalone builds rather than the web player, since the performance will be much bigger. The “universal” builds (Mac, Linux) can be run from both 32 bit & 64 bit, however, on Windows you have to download a specific version. See you on the battlefield.

Well, FINALLY I got to write this. At last. Whew. Sorry for the delay, tons of things seem to happen now.

WELL. First point. I am working on Tunnelers multi-player, but it;s been DAMN harder that I thought. All those little complications that just show up and then hit you in the face. Sometimes I spend a week in debugging.

To make it clearer what I’m doing, I’m gonna write it all here.

So, second point. I wanted to the ship the first multi-player release with CTF. Why?

It’s the best mode.

It’s awesome.

It would be boring to just run around a simple map with a tank with nothing to do.

But, this also created some major complications, listing

The game needed a game manager, that would sync the scores of the team and the players between the server and the client.

The game also needed actual flags that work with the network system fluently.

And, that’s all. It doesn’t look like much, but imagine you have to write down EVERY DAMN game event as a method in the server script, together with how it changes the scores, etc., and the write down all of the game events as methods AGAIN in the client script, AND THEN make the execute of the client method from the server method with an RPC call, and make sure every parameter can be RPC-ed, and if not, convert it to something that can be, and then convert it back in the client script.

Third point. The WORLD. Ya, the world. Actually it’s quite a small world with some cubes and stuff. Here it is:

Say, “Hello, World”. Well, it’s not called “World”, but “test_scene”. Okay, it’s not called that, but it will. right now it’s called “c_sharp_network_test”. I didn’t have time to rename it. But I will.

The problem with spammers is also solved (at least I hope). I’m testing a anti-spam plugin (it’s like an anti-virus but it’s anti-spam), and it seems to be working. I had 200+ users before it, but now it has deleted about 200 users and left me with 8. My host reported my database writable with 0.5 MB on it. It has a limitation of 30 MB and it was full. Again, because of this database problem, cause the database will not last forever, I might change the hosting to wordpress.com. Maybe.

Also: this site now has an alias on vacuumwithstyle.6f.sk . Technically, it’s the same site, but with a different name. I like it more so I might change it permanently if there won’t be any issues.

You might see this post on Facebook and Twitter too. I’m testing the auto-poster, so you can follow this page there too. No Google+ I’m afraid. It hasn’t got an read/write API, so it’s not easy to auto-post there. There are ways, but they’re a bit difficult.

Be careful while registering please. There’s a security question. As you might have guessed, the answer is no, but it reports correct/wrong answers 0/1865.